Subsequent orbital missions were more complicated, with more variables involving the position and rotation of the Earth, so Johnson used a celestial training device to perform her calculations. "You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off," Johnson said according to a NASA (opens in new tab).
So when NASA wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, she was not deterred. For NASA's 1961 Mercury mission, she knew that the trajectory would be a parabola, a type of symmetrical curve. Johnson's passion was geometry, which was useful for calculating the trajectories of spacecraft. With the Soviet Union launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the US was determined not to fall behind and so the Space Race began. Katherine Johnson, pictured here at NASA's Langley Research Center, where she worked as a computer and mathematician from 1953 to 1986. It's not just that you have to not discriminate, but you also have to have a positive plan for affirmative action, in which you demonstrate that you're taking the steps necessary to bring these jobs to African Americans," Odom added. So equal employment becomes a huge thing and for the first time in that executive order, we see that term "affirmative action". "The federal government, from the very beginning of this process, is committed to equal employment opportunity and that's something that John F Kennedy in March of 1961, with a new executive order, really makes a key part of this programme. So basically what's happening is NASA is building a huge infrastructure in the time period from 1958 to 1963, at the build up for Apollo, in the Jim Crow segregated south," Odom said. Today we'll think of Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, but there were other locations across the south too near New Orleans and South Mississippi. "Once NASA comes online in 1958 you see the build up of a lot of centres in the south. Johnson's time working for NASA would prove to be a more positive experience with regards to racial segregation given NASA's diversity policies. I had to be," Johnson said in 1999 (opens in new tab) of her time working for the NACA and later NASA. "We needed to be assertive as women in those days - assertive and aggressive - and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. But Johnson ignored the racial and gender barriers of the time and became the first woman in the Flight Research Division to be credited as an author on a research report. When she started at NACA, Johnson and her black colleagues were required to work, eat and use restrooms separately from the white employees. In addition to excelling at her work, Johnson was exceptionally curious and assertive, always questioning her colleagues and asking to be included in important meetings. Katherine really does play a role in that human computing lab," NASA historian Brian Odom told our sister publication All About History. "Before these big IBM mainframe computers came in really relied on human beings to do the math for calculating trajectories. She was soon hired as a "computer" at the Langley Research Center (opens in new tab), tasked with performing and checking calculations for flight tests. Then, in 1952, a relative told her about an exciting new opportunity: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor to NASA, was hiring black women to solve math problems. A year into her coursework, she left to raise her three daughters.
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